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blake kathryn
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AnasAbdin
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
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@pennypaperbrain
Application temporarily unresponsive.
British. Sarcastic. Smart. Bipolar. Bisexual. Kinky. Not getting any younger.
All blorbos are neurodivergent and kinky. I do make the rules.
Adult followers only, please.
My AO3 profile. Mostly recent-ish Loki and old Sherlock fics.
It’s my last night in Kramatorsk. Possibly until autumn, very likely forever. As per my last conversation with a local:
Me: I’ll be back in autumn.
Him: You won’t be able to come here in autumn, I think.
Me: … I don’t know.
Him: You’ll be in this country?
Me: Yes.
Him: Call me!
OK, well, last I heard, this particular guy had sworn to go down with the city, let the bastard Russians kill him (and believe me they will), etc., so it sounds like he doesn’t expect that to have happened yet, at least. Which is nice. But he doesn’t expect Kramatorsk to be the kind of place any outsiders visit. It’s an established model of east Ukrainian living now: the town that still has locals living in the rubble, but nobody visits unless on a short mission of the body armour and shotguns variety. By which I basically mean social care. That requires body armour and shotguns now.
I’m tired.
… aaand that was quite a big explosion, even by local standards. Sounds like a glide bomb hitting a block of flats. Likely explanations for this include: a glide bomb hitting a block of flats. Well, it’ll be on Instagram shortly. I really probably ought to be more shaken by this stuff, but I don’t even get an adrenaline spike any more. Which is handy when you are trying to go to sleep, that being Russian happy hour for large explosives aimed at the residential sector.
I have been to Kramatorsk six times now, staying I think a total of about four months and have grown attached to it. Leaving it wondering [more acutely than on previous occasions] if it’s finally going to be obliterated as you watch from afar is strange. Now imagine leaving your hometown wondering that.
I get to go back to my Ponder in another week. I will have been in Ukraine ten weeks in total, which is too long; I always start flagging after eight weeks. But I had good reason to extend my stay, returning to Kramatorsk in particular. There are groups of Ukrainians here doing lifesaving work who have not previously been able to access foreign support, or only in a limited way. I have increased that ability in a number of cases, sometimes considerably. Result. I have done well. Whatever happens next.
Now there’s a weird throbbing sound somewhere down the street. I have started to think of that sort of thing as ‘War Noise NOS’ and there are a lot of variations on it (the majority of which are probably, in fact, clapped out cars). Now it’s gone.
The Russians can’t ‘take’ Kramatorsk in the traditional war sense of the army advancing until they are inside it. But they can obliterate it, and are doing so. I realised walking through the main square that 95% of the buildings are boarded up, significantly damaged or ruined. A couple of shops are functioning behind reinforced shutters. I hadn’t really noticed it was that bad because apparently my standards for what constitutes a ‘ruin’ are rather more stringent than they used to be. Glide bombs have been hitting the city in daylight, especially the central park, where the Russians are apparently determined to destroy the giant flag (and keep failing; last night they had another go and managed to damage a bandstand) and one spot on Akademichna Street which seems to be Ground Zero for reasons I cannot fathom.
Tomorrow I’ll get the bus out. There are three main approach roads to Kramatorsk, all of which are now subject to FPV attacks. These drones are on fibreoptic cables and can’t be detected by handheld detection devices or disabled by electronic jamming. Your best bet is a guy with a shotgun, which is not really an option for the intercity minibus. The drone netting helps, but the drones get under the stuff. Not that more than a tiny proportion of vehicles are getting blown up, but it's the vibe. Fucking drone nets are depressing. It's like, there's all the glories of the sky but you're in a cage because all the energies of humanity currently seem to be focused on destruction.
And yet my opinion of humanity is paradoxically improving, because I get to meet the best of the best here. People striving 24/7 to help others, often while living on humanitarian aid themselves. It's my privilege to find a way to help their work or boost them. As soon as I'm out of here you can bet I'll want to be back, doing that. To a large extent I can do it from home for a while now; once enough fog, wtfery and fail have been cleared out of the way for relationships to be initiated across the local volunteer/foreign aid divide, they can usually grow on their own.
which one of u was going to tell me that tea tastes different if u put it in hot water?
y- you were putting it in cold water?????
Radish. Answer the question radish.
yeah??? i thought for like. 5 years that ppl just put it in hot water 2 speed up the tea-ification process didn’t realize there was an actual reason
You dont have the patience to microwave water for 3 minutes???
[ID: Tags reading “u think i have the patience to boil water wtf ?????” /End ID]
why are you. putting it in the microwave to boil it
Do you think I have the patience to boil water on the stove
Its takes less than a minute
Bestie is ur stovetop powered by the fucking sun
How long does it take you to boil a cup of water on the stove
Like seven minutes
Just stick the mug on top of the stove on medium heat n it boils in like two minutes… less than that is u use a saucepan…
Crying you’re putting the whole mug on the stove ???? On medium heat???? Ur stove is enchanted
Every single person in this post is a fucking lunatic
Yet another post that reads like four shakespeare characters who come out in the middle of the play to talk about something completely unrelated for comic relief
(Enter RADISHN’T, MOTHMAN MISATO, BOIMG FROG and CATS'N RAINCOATS, stage left. They are having a HEATED DISCUSSION.)
RADISHN’T: Prithee, which one of you had planned to tell
Of diff'rent flavours gained by simple act
Of brewing tea with water hot, not cold?
MOTHMAN: Egad! you poured the water cold? Wherefore?!
FROG: An answer from you, Radish, I must beg.
RADISHN’T: Indeed I did, dear friends - why does this shock?
Without the guide of others I assumed
That heat was merely added for the sake
Of expediting this solution’s brewing!
Half a decade I have spent, or more,
Not questioning this worldview I had made.
In fact, I am myself a bit surprised
That you might think that I, your dearest friend,
Might have a patience of sufficient stock
To wait until a pot of water boils.
FROG: Three minutes overtaxes patience so?
The microwave will beep when it is done!
CATS'N: My friend, this answer vexes me the more!
Can it be true that thou dost boil by nuke?!
FROG: Are you in turn, my friend, so shocked to know
That I have not the patience, like our Root,
To boil upon the stove our favour’d drink?
CATS'N: It takes less than a minute!
FROG: On what plate?
Perhaps your dinner cooks atop the sun?
CATS'N: How long can take your stove to fill the task
Of boiling but a single cup alone?
FROG: In minutes?
CATS'N: Yes!
FROG: I counted seven, once.
CATS'N: Perhaps you ought to have your timepiece checked!
If on a middle heat you place the cup
You soon will have the scalding drink you crave.
Two minutes, in a mug upon the plate
Or even less, if you should have a pot.
FROG: You cause me tears - is this how thou dost live?
You place upon the iron stove a mug?
A mug, ceramic, filled with water cold?
How do these flames, though medium in height,
Not shatter like a glass this fragile thing?
Surely, then, your kitchen is bewitched
With magicks far beyond the mortal ken!
(The FOUR realise they have wandered into the THRONE ROOM. The ROYAL COURT watches with fascination.)
KING: Ev'ry single person in this group must be a fucking lunatic, it seems.
I’m sorry but the THOUGHT that has been put into this, I actually CAN’T—
The fact that nearly every line is so metrically considered- near perfect iambic pentameter witb the occasional trochee for emphasis, but usually retaining a strong sense of rhythm nonetheless. And then the king comes in at the end, so wound in his disbelief that his response is reduced to prose.
And the even better thing about this is how easy it would have been to structure the king’s line into iambic pentameter: it is effectively already said as such because of the way wizardlyghost has phrased it, yet they haven’t!! They did not break the line, rendering what, by all typically of both Shakespearean canon and other periods context should be the character with the most command and authority in the whole play. If there was ever a more effective way to convey a genuine “what the fuck??”, I know of it not.
But it gets better!! Shakespeare regularly uses meter in order to represent class divide; the nobility usually speak in iambic pentameter, save for a few particularly chosen moments (e.g. Lady Macbeth’s descent into madness, Othello’s realisation of Desdemona’s “betrayal”) or just lines where Shakespeare needs to suggest high emotion or when a character is lost in thought. Supernatural characters like the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Witches in Macbeth usually speak in trochaic tetrameter, an inversion of iambic pentameter. Lower class characters, particularly those used for comic relief (usually under the influence of alcohol), speak with no structure at all: their language is plain prose. Therefore, if this is a conversation between these types of characters, as the prompt from silvergirachi suggests, why the hell are the characters speaking so eloquently???
Now, this is Tumblr. It is subsequently logical to assume that this may have merely been a humorous recreation (and a very good one at that) of the Shakespearean style in a way that is widely recognisable to an audience that may or may not have read a great deal of Shakespeare, which is understandable. However, logic is boring so I’m going to probe further into this to the point where future historians will look to this as an example of overanalysing.
The inherent eloquence of the characters here suggests an unusual subversion of the roles typically assumed in Shakespearean comedy. This could be interpreted along two major avenues: firstly, that the rhetoric displayed by the speakers is fundamentally representative of how truth can be expected even from the most seemingly pointless or ludicrous discussions. Furthermore, it could suggest that it matters not how well constructed your speeches are: if you talk bullshit, it’s going to sound that way despite your attempts to hide it.
This is similar but not identical to the second avenue of interpretation: there is the implication that the noblemen in the play are in fact the comic relief characters, therefore implying that the “common people” of the play are the ones whose influence, though not expressed in such a highly spoken manner, makes a lot more sense than whatever the hell this is. If this was a real Shakespeare play, I would call it a subtle exploration into the innate corruption of the rich and powerful. Well done, op.
Now, I doubt any of this is actually grounded analysis in any way, shape or form, but if someone else can take this to the extremes of writing a Shakespearean scene, why can I not analyse it as such? And where else to do so than Tumblr?
im in tears i didnt think anyone would put this much analysis into this‚ thank you so much
i also like that everyone else gets a version of their handle and then tumblr user pidoop is promoted to king
I am in awe of this post.
I just want you all to know, that if and when this site does experience a real exodus and/or get sunsetted for good, even if we don't keep in touch I'll remember you so fondly. You're the online equivalent of the other kid on the beach where we built sandcastles together; the girl at the campsite where we explored the trees. You're the drunk person who shared kind words in the bathroom at the club, you're the talented artists at the life drawing class or the poetry night in a city where I don't live anymore. It makes me sad that maybe in the future our paths won't cross so easily, but even when we leave this little shared piece of cyberspace, carried away on our briefly intersecting trajectories, just know I still love you
my two brain cells
This is what executive dysfunction looks like
Inside you there are two hamsters…
The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien
I’ve been in east Ukraine for seven weeks and will probably be here for three more. I keep thinking about updating Tumblr. It is supposed to be the place to anonymously blow off steam about your weird life after all.
Except my life is not weird, just slightly ahead of its time: with the rate at which the technology is developing, the entire world will be worrying about killer drones soon enough. Shaheds can fly 4,000 kilometres, and are now able to carry payloads of FPV quadcopter drones which they can drop anywhere.
Apparently there was a ceasefire over Easter. It was only violated by Russia about 8,000 times, according to the official count. It finished at midnight on Sunday, and my friend turned to me and said, 'Oh my God! The war's started!' and this was the funniest thing ever. Obviously.
It's the night before I leave London for Ukraine again. This is my sixth trip as a humanitarian volunteer. A term I don't even like but omg don't call me an 'aid worker', I will bite you. It's completely wrong because I'm self-funding and donate some of my own income on top, but inevitably people do it. But large charities have a very bad reputation, for multiple reasons.
Anyway... I have to get up at 0345 to do this and waking up to a blaring alarm at 0345 and realising it's time to head voluntarily to a war zone is not a lifetime high; but the whole point is to fight against a situation where millions of people are awake at 0345 every night listening to a thousand shaheds dive-bombing their cities while it's -2 indoors because Russia destroyed all the power stations.
What else is there to say. Everyone in Ukraine is exhausted. It's my job to bounce in full of the well-fed energy of someone who has not been bombed and frozen for four months and try to walk the line between proactive and annoying. On the basis of previous showings, there will be some results.
please don't forget about ukraine. we are still bombed every day. our houses razed to the ground. our electricity stations destroyed so we sit in darkness and cold. our children kidnapped and given to russian families. in occupied territories, russians take our homes, while the owners are buried in backyards.
I am pleased to draw the attention of the collected lesbianry of tumblr to Cissy Meldrum, from the British series You Rang, M’Lord? which ran on the BBC from 1988 to 1993. The show is apparently a cult in Hungary, but if you're not Hungarian or a Brit aged 40+ you probably don't know that it's a sitcom take on a Downton Abbey situation, set in the late 1920s, and Cissy is the daughter of Lord Meldrum.
Spoilers below, obviously.
Cissy is not quite ‘openly lesbian’ as we’d understand it. She talks about ‘my chum Penelope’, not ‘my lover Penelope’. However, there’s a highly emphasized screen kiss (googling suggests that by some definitions this was the first lesbian kiss on the BBC), they dance cheek to cheek and on one occasion Ivy the housemaid enters Cissy’s room in the morning to find them asleep in bed together, so while if you are absolutely determined you can just interpret her as an eccentric posh woman you can, but that’s not what it looks like to 2026 eyes. A non-binary interpretation of Cissy works too if that’s your jam, but it’s not what the original intended.
In the first season there’s a bit of crass stuff about how the innocent Ivy should be careful and not hang around if she has to go into Miss Cissy’s room, but the writers soon dropped that, presumably after realising what they had on their hands: a genuinely original character. And the characterisation is realistic enough for a sitcom in that a lord’s daughter could get away with this kind of thing. If Ivy had fallen in love with another housemaid, it’s hard to imagine that going well.
A couple of early scenes excepted, Cissy is never there to be A Lesbian. She just does her thing while being lesbian, and sometimes it’s intentionally hilarious because the other characters aren’t really homophobic, they just don’t know what to DO with this. They mostly pretend not to register it, or occasionally stand there gaping with ‘How is this happening?’ in a thought bubble over their heads. Meanwhile, some viewers at home were gaping at the screen with ‘Fuck yeah it’s happening!’ in a thought bubble over their heads.
Most of the other characters have a relationship arc with another main character: Cissy’s bratty sister Poppy leads the footman on, Lord Meldrum’s having an affair, Ivy pines after that same handsome footman, etc. Cissy’s girlfriend couldn’t feature in that way, which created a need and opportunity for the writers to give her other things to do. She helps set up a birth control clinic and a soup kitchen; she flies a biplane as her hobby; she stands for election for the United Workers’ Party – and gets in. Quite often when someone else is in a mess Cissy helps them, but not in the role of dutiful feminine helpmeet. The servants remark a number of times that she’s the one of ‘them upstairs’ who treats them like people. When the footman has to smuggle his n’er-do-well father out of the country, Cissy drives them to the docks. Then punches out a sailor who leers at her and tries to gouge them for more money.
I rewatched this series over Christmas, even though I watch very little TV, because while I don’t remember what I thought of Cissy generally, in ye olden days when families often sat down to watch broadcast TV together in the evening, I do remember the last episode. Lord Meldrum loses all his money and is going to have to close down the rubber factory on which the family fortunes are based. Then Lady Lavender – the batty mother-in-law who Meldrum earlier tries and fails to have declared insane so he can get her money, a point of feminist interest in itself I see in retrospect – produces a pile of jewels which she hands over to the servants. They consult Cissy, and she takes charge and arranges for the funds to be used to buy new machinery to keep the factory going, after which she will restructure it to run as a workers’ collective.
I kept waiting for the inevitable reveal: that Cissy was deluded in some way and it was all going to go wrong, and she would be put in her place by the men or at least her bratty sister… but it didn’t happen. The smart, competent, visibly non-conforming woman used her brain to save the day for everyone and was rewarded for it!
Cissy is a main character and appears in all the episodes, but I've linked to a handy compilation of her best moments which someone compiled on YouTube.
@havingbeenbreathedout I'm not sure what you're writing these days but if you visit the 1920s again, she's surely got to have a cameo.
It's been 8 years, but I have now updated my WIP.
As a fic reader, this gives me hope for some WIPs I've been hoping to read more of, but haven't seen updates for in years.
As a fic writer, I'm just thrilled that brain found its way back to this particular special interest, because I just enjoy it so much.
And I've even forgotten how to do the link thing on tumblr, so there'll be no fancy link, just this one:
https://archiveofourown.org/works/3918760/chapters/197567136
I have been in this situation of returning to writing—or writing a specific story—after years & years away, and it is the BEST and most nourishing feeling. I’m so happy for you that you are getting to experience it. Congratulations on the update, old fandom-mate ❤️
Congratulations to you too, @havingbeenbreathedout! And I have been thinking of you lately because I've discovered a character who is so far up your street she's on your doorstep smirking suggestively, and the chances of you already knowing her are very low. Not that I think you are in the market for a fandom (neither am I) but this you want to see. Post about this woman to follow when I have finished watching the series.
It's been 8 years, but I have now updated my WIP.
As a fic reader, this gives me hope for some WIPs I've been hoping to read more of, but haven't seen updates for in years.
As a fic writer, I'm just thrilled that brain found its way back to this particular special interest, because I just enjoy it so much.
And I've even forgotten how to do the link thing on tumblr, so there'll be no fancy link, just this one:
https://archiveofourown.org/works/3918760/chapters/197567136
did your parents *"pre-screen" the media you interacted with when you were a kid/before legal adult age where you are?
yes, always AND they did parental guidance talks about it
yes, always but there was no parental guidance involved
sometimes, with parental guidance talks
sometimes, no parental guidance talks
not usually, but occasionally (WITH parental guidance)
not usually, but occasionally (WITHOUT parental guidance)
they never pre-screened but there were other rules (elaborate?)
my parents fully didn't give a shit about what media i engaged with
see results
*by "pre-screening", i typically mean any sort of behavior that exists on a spectrum of "actually watching/playing/reading the thing before you played it" to "doing any sort of research on it before letting you watch it".
feel free to share your experiences in the tags or replies or whatever!
admittedly, i am a little obsessed with like 65% of the tags on this post so far basically saying "my parents didn't pre-screen things but they [describes behavior that DEFINITELY qualifies as pre-screening]". i kinda hope maybe this post and others like it wake some people up to the fact that yes, even YOUR parents were controlling what perspectives and ideas you were and were not being allowed to access.
There was genuinely zero pre-screening (UK, 1980s). Which I do find a bit odd in retrospect. But I also did not have the ability to find anything outside of the local library or the four, then five, TV channels the UK had at the time. Which seems a significant factor. And at none of my schools were kids swapping porn under the desks. I doubt my parents would have stood for that.
I’ve been back in London for a month. I feel fairly grounded here this time, and not like it’s all fake, as the UK has felt sometimes shortly after return. For months at a time I do basically nothing that isn’t a) for Ukrainian resistance, b) to get paid (so I can continue working for Ukrainian resistance) or c) to keep the practicalities of life on track (so I can continue working for Ukrainian resistance) but the aim is to take it easy for a few weeks over the holiday season.
Then I’m reminded that my friends in Kyiv only have 3 hours of electricity a day, or that Trump is trying to give away Donetsk oblast and its entire population again. Or I see one of my Kramatorsk friends/contacts/person-who-probably-only-half-registers-my-existence-but-it-doesn’t-matter-as-long-as-I’m-managing-to-channel-resources-to-him post his daily video, which is always some version of this sequence:
‘Here we are in [small town very close to the front line].’
Explosions in the middle distance.
Quick camera pan around a semirural half-ruined street.
‘We’re evacuating a bedridden old lady.’
Footage of an old lady being carried by armoured-up volunteers and her husband hobbling beside them.
‘Effing sodding drones...’ He holds up part of a drone that nearly blew up his car earlier.
‘This place is hell’.
Everyone hustles into the car.
Another explosion somewhere nearby.
‘But we keep working.’
A man of few words and many actions, some of which I am able to fund, in spite of the fact that PayPal closed his account down because they think rescuing people from the advancing Russian army is a suspicious activity, thus effectively cutting off (almost) all Western support.
Then I put the Christmas decorations up with Ponder.
so a very long time ago, my dad worked with an arson investigator
this guy was often one of the first people on the scene following a suspected arson, once emergency services had done what they needed to do. at times, there were also civilians on the periphery. often, they were freaking out, and understandably so; their home or workplace had just, quite literally, gone up in smoke
this investigator wouldn’t try to calm them down. he wouldn’t comfort them or be a shoulder to cry on.
instead, he’d walk up to the person most visibly losing their shit, hand them a fire extinguisher, and say “hey, can you keep an eye out for any other fires, and if you see one, can you put it out with this?”
of course, there was no actual risk of another fire. he wouldn’t be on the scene investigating if there was even a chance that the fire wasn’t completely put out. but the bystander didn’t need to know that
because that person, without fail, would immediately pull it together, take the fire extinguisher, and stand guard. they were, at least temporarily, calm enough for this investigator to do this job
my dad has told me the parable of the fire extinguisher a hundred times, and i think about it a lot. i think about what it says about people and crises. i think about what it says about the grounding power of having a purpose. and i think about the importance of letting someone help me through something, even if that help is just going to be another casserole to throw into the freezer, because useless or not, that fire extinguisher might be the only thing holding them together
hey, just spitballing here.
Does the reason so many of us have anxiety today is because we don't feel we have a purpose?
I don't think that's the root cause but it can be one reason the anxiety is so high in the mix. As the world devolves into chaos, there are at least more purposes available...
